David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

The point is that it’s not just the death-by-canonization thing: there is real and alienating stuff that stands in the way of our appreciating Dostoevsky and has to be dealt with — either by learning enough about all the unfamiliar stuff that it stops being so confusing, or else by accepting it (the same way we accept racist/sexist elements in some other nineteenth-century books) and just grimacing and reading on anyway.

But the larger point (which, yes, may be kind of obvious) is that some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation; and Dostoevsky’s books are definitely worth the work. And this is so not just because of his bestriding the Western canon — if anything, it’s despite that. For one thing that canonization and course assignments obscure is that Dostoevsky isn’t just great — he’s also fun. His novels almost always have ripping good plots, lurid and intricate and thoroughly dramatic. There are murders and attempted murders and police and dysfunctional-family feuding and spies, tough guys and beautiful fallen women and unctuous con men and wasting illnesses and sudden inheritances and silky villains and scheming and whores.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good. The main thing that keeps Krantz and Grisham and lot of other gifted storytellers from being artistically good is that they don’t have any talent for (or interest in) characterization — their compelling plots are inhabited by crude and unconvincing stick figures. (In fairness, there are also writers who are good at making complex and fully realized human characters but don’t seem able to insert those characters into a believable and interesting plot. Plus others — often among the academic avant-garde — who seem expert/interested in neither plot nor character, whose books’ movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas.)

The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they are alive . By which I don’t just mean that they’re successfully realized or developed or “rounded.” The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, 14 the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P’ s ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all-too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive — retain what Frank calls their “immense vitality”—not because they’re just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious — the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky’s characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860s’ intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death’s inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth….

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being — that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

** Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief — I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind? **

It’s a well-known irony that Dostoevsky, whose work is famous for its compassion and moral rigor, was in many ways a prick in real life — vain, arrogant, spiteful, selfish. A compulsive gambler, he was usually broke, and whined constantly about his poverty, and was always badgering his friends and colleagues for emergency loans that he seldom repaid, and held petty and long-standing grudges over money, and did things like pawn his delicate wife’s winter coat so he could gamble, etc. 15

But it’s just as well known that Dostoevsky’s own life was full of incredible suffering and drama and tragedy and heroism. His Moscow childhood was evidently so miserable that in his books Dostoevsky never once sets or even mentions any action in Moscow. 16 His remote and neurasthenic father was murdered by his own serfs when FMD was seventeen. Seven years later, the publication of his first novel, 17 and its endorsement by critics like Belinsky and Herzen, made Dostoevsky a literary star at the same time he was starting to get involved with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of revolutionary intellectuals who plotted to incite a peasant uprising against the tsar. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a conspirator, convicted, sentenced to death, and subjected to the famous “mock execution of the Petrashevtsy,” in which the conspirators were blindfolded and tied to stakes and taken all the way to the “Aim!” stage of the firing-squad process before an imperial messenger galloped in with a supposed “last-minute” reprieve from the merciful tsar. His sentence commuted to imprisonment, the epileptic Dostoevsky ended up spending a decade in balmy Siberia, returning to St. Petersburg in 1859 to find that the Russian literary world had all but forgotten him. Then his wife died, slowly and horribly; then his devoted brother died; then their journal Epoch went under; then his epilepsy started getting so bad that he was constantly terrified that he’d die or go insane from the seizures. 18 Hiring a twenty-two-year-old stenographer to help him complete The Gambler in time to satisfy a publisher with whom he’d signed an insane deliver-by-a-certain-date-or-forfeit-all-royalties-for-everything-you-ever-wrote contract, Dostoevsky married this lady six months later, just in time to flee Epoch’ s creditors with her, wander unhappily through a Europe whose influence on Russia he despised, 19 have a beloved daughter who died of pneumonia almost right away, writing constantly, penniless, often clinically depressed in the aftermath of tooth-rattling grand mal seizures, going through cycles of manic roulette binges and then crushing self-hatred. Frank’s Volume IV relates a lot of Dostoevsky’s European tribulations via the journals of his new young wife, Anna Snitkin, 20 whose patience and charity as a spouse might well qualify her as a patron saint of today’s codependency groups. 21